—Udemy, a Palo Alto startup building an online platform for “casual learning” courseware, said that it has collected $1 million in seed funding from a group of Silicon Valley angel investors including Keith Rabois and Russ Fradin. I profiled the startup.

—I indulged in a rant about my least favorite Apple product, iTunes. On top of all of its other functions, from storing music to activating iPhones to printing jewel case inserts, Steve Jobs unveiled a new social networking service built into iTunes, called Ping. My essay must have hit a nerve, as it has attracted almost 100 comments from readers.

—The benefits and challenges of spinning off corporate R&D projects as independent companies was the focus of my two-part conversation with David Tennenhouse, a partner at New Venture Partners in San Mateo, CA. We published Part 1 on September 1 and Part 2 on September 2.

—VMware, the Palo Alto, CA-based virtualization subsidiary of EMC, announced at its annual VMworld conference in San Francisco that it had purchased both Integrien, an Irvine, CA-based maker of real-time infrastructure analytics software, and TriCipher, a Los Gatos, CA-based cloud security company, as Erin reported.